a thousand times when Noiz behaved horribly and the one time he didn't
by PikaCheeka
Summary: Noiz wakes Koujaku up one night with an unusual request, and suddenly everything changes.


by PikaCheeka

He wakes to a sharp kick in the side. "What the fu-" He gasps, groggy and disoriented. He can't remember the last time someone awoke him in the middle of the night.

"I want to sleep underneath you. Move it." A harsh, emotionless voice in the dark beside him, too close to him.

The request is so bizarre and unexpected that Koujaku sputters to full wakefulness. "You what?"

"I want to sleep underneath you." Noiz repeats himself flatly, as if he were only asking him to pass an extra pillow or turn the light off. This is a nightmare. It has to be. Traveling with Noiz, who has no manners or common sense and acts like a snobbish feral cat that somehow gained the aptitude for speech and a supremely human obnoxiousness, is always a nightmare, but this is unprecedented.

Koujaku narrows his eyes. "Are you coming onto me, because-"

"…Ah. No."

He could _feel_ Noiz's eyes roving up and down him as he answered, and he doesn't know if he should be offended or not. But he only sighs. "Then what's your problem?"

"I sleep best with pressure and there aren't any extra blankets here." His face and eyes are unreadable as ever, but there is no hint of that sneer Koujaku despises so much. He says it so calmly, so reasonably, that the older man wonders if he is dreaming.

But he isn't, because then Noiz is pressing hard against him, kicking his legs to slide his own underneath, rolling him onto his side to take his place on the futon. Koujaku is too startled and disbelieving to resist; he pushes himself up to his elbows and watches the younger man reposition himself, stretch out on his stomach at the exact spot he had just been lying in, one arm under the pillow and one at his side. The black of his long sleeved shirt and leggings are sharp against the white of the futon in the dim light filtering through the windows. _Sleep best with pressure._ He suddenly remembers catching Noiz taking out the extra futon at Aoba's house so long ago, Noiz lying on the hard floor underneath the stairs, wedging the futon between himself and the stairs directly above. He hadn't bothered to ask at the time, as strange as it was, for he had been too disgusted and horrified at seeing Noiz staying the night at Aoba's, even if it were only to sleep on the floor… It's only then when he realizes the tatami mat under his elbow. He can sleep on the floor, kick Noiz out of the way, or do as he says.

"I don't believe this."

"Shut up and lie on me."

Koujaku doesn't know why he obeys. Maybe he's just too tired to care. Maybe it's the sheer strangeness of the request. Maybe he's curious. He doesn't want to think about it too deeply. He moves hesitantly, getting to his knees, lowering himself again over the other man. One arm under the pillow beside him. He realizes he doesn't know what to do with the other arm and merely drapes it over the side of the futon, strangely desperate to avoid touching Noiz's hand. _Not that it matters_ , he almost smiles bitterly, given what he's doing. But at that moment, Noiz exhales softly underneath him and Koujaku begins to think too deeply.

This makes him nervous. Noiz is sharp and angular and bony and uncomfortable to lie on. Noiz is a man, and a man eight years younger than him at that, not even out of his teens yet. Noiz is someone he'd fought with hundreds of times and made out with seventeen times and groped three times and fucked never in the three short short _short_ months they'd known one another. Noiz is more attractive than he ever cares to admit to himself. And Noiz-

"You can lie on your back on top, if you want."

 _Why would he say that? Does he know what I'm thinking?_ He fights back a spark of anxiety, of rage. "That sounds so uncomfortable I can't believe you'd even suggest it."

"Then don't complain and go to sleep."

Ah yes, and that. Noiz is also one of the most horrible, obnoxious, insolent, cold, antagonistic, and unpleasant people he has ever met. "You don't think this is weird?" Koujaku snaps, inhaling too sharply, catching a clump of Noiz's hair between his teeth. He bites down angrily. The younger man hasn't washed his hair recently and this somehow doesn't surprise him. _He probably just sits in the bath and stares at the wall for 45 minutes._

"It's fine."

"You're a freak." He feels Noiz tighten beneath him, ever so slightly, and wonders if he's going to suddenly leap up and try to fight him.

But no. "Whatever."

"Why do you like this? Why are you so weird?" He knows he shouldn't ask, knows he should stop, but an ugliness is seeping through his mind as he feels the thin body beneath him tense again. It's so subtle he'd never have noticed it were he not lying flat against him.

"Because I'm a freak. Obviously." His voice is as flat and bored as ever, but he sounds…smaller.

There's something in the way he says it that unexpectedly terrifies Koujaku. He opens his mouth to respond but what cruelty was once on his tongue shrivels and dies; there's nothing he can say. Noiz makes no movement between them, his breaths slow and heavy and somehow difficult, somehow small and tired and afraid, and as the minutes pass, Koujaku wonders if he is pretending to be asleep or if he simply doesn't know what to say either. He wonders what he is thinking about.

Suddenly the silence is suffocating. The words spill out before he can stop himself. "My father hired men to torture me."

Noiz's heart doesn't skip a beat beneath him, keeps a steady pace to Koujaku's violent pounding. "My parents kept me locked away in a room and pretended I didn't exist for nine years."

He feels something simultaneously freeze and shatter within him and suddenly he's crushing the frail body beneath him to his chest, arms tight around his ribs and legs entangled. He knows without knowing that this is the truth. He blindly remembers a thousand times when Noiz behaved horribly, when he was rude or insolent or disrespectful or irresponsible or careless or just cruel, when he spat out food he disliked in restaurants, when he pushed someone out of his assigned seat on the train without asking them to move, when he told Aoba he was stupid for caring about Allmates, when he bullied and harassed his own Rhyme teammates, when he loudly asked Virus and Trip if they were fuck buddies in the middle of the street, when he responded to a casual remark with a punch, when he made a mess everywhere he went and simply _stared_ when asked to clean up, when he snapped at Tae for worrying that he wasn't eating enough, when he broke into people's houses to look at their computers, when he randomly assaulted strangers in the street, when he…no. When _he_ would hit Noiz, pull his hair and grab his piercings, yell at him, call him a freak a spoiled brat an entitled child, ask him if he'd been raised in a barn, and when Noiz would snort or sneer or smile and jump on him, drag him to the ground, mercilessly beat him – except for the time he didn't, the time he'd only slowly turned and walked away, eyes dead and shoulders slumped, because Koujaku had been right. "Shut up," he whispers.

"Oh, so you don't want bedtime stories now?" That bored drawl again.

"Shut up." He says again, through gritted teeth as he presses his face hard into Noiz's neck, breathing his scent in, inhaling his sweat and desolation. He can't bear to hear any more. He isn't ready. Because if he knows the truth about Noiz, if he knows… "Just shut up and stay with me."

The response is so soft he wonders if he imagined it.


End file.
